The Charlotte News

Monday, June 12, 1950

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Senate refused to shelve the rent control bill, by a vote of 44 to 25 on a motion by Senator Kenneth Wherry to send it back to the Banking Committee. No Democrat voted in favor of the motion, though some indicated intent to vote against the rent control extension. Before the vote, Senator Burnet Maybank of South Carolina, chairman of the Banking Committee, said that if the bill were recommitted to the Committee, it would immediately send it back to the floor unchanged. The vote was regarded as a test of the sentiment in the body for extension of the bill beyond its current expiration on June 30. Senator Harry Cain of Washington, who had staged a ten-hour filibuster against the bill the previous week, said that he remained committed to defeating it.

In Tokyo, General MacArthur's headquarters banned the Tokyo correspondent for the London Times, Frank Hawley, as persona non grata for his reports on Japan and the occupation not being properly objective. But the General's chief of staff had told Mr. Hawley the previous week that a study of his dispatches had shown him opposed to Communism and so headquarters was baffled by his criticism of the MacArthur administration.

Near Pittsburgh, the Allegheny River spillway took four lives and four others, including one of the initial rescuers, were rescued after a cabin-cruiser carrying six persons rode over an eleven-foot dam. One of the initial rescuers was drowned in the attempt.

In Philadelphia, a Federal District Court Judge delayed indefinitely the Government's request to transfer Harry Gold, accused of providing secret documents to convicted British nuclear scientist Dr. Klaus Fuchs for transmission to the Russians, following a request by his appointed defense counsel to be afforded an opportunity to interview further his client. The judge said that the reason he had appointed the attorney was his well known patriotism beyond reproach and so he was willing to grant the request.

How do we know the judge is not a Commie?

In New York, the arraignment of Frank Erickson on his 60 counts of gambling handed down by a Grand Jury was postponed until Wednesday.

In Raleigh, Governor Kerr Scott said that he was studying the SBI investigation of the charges of WRAL radio station news director Jesse Helms brought on Friday, that State prison director J. B. Moore had used prison labor to paint his home and build a garage with an apartment above it. Mr. Moore had responded that the prison labor was being used for short periods only and on a strictly voluntary basis, assisting the prison trusty normally assigned for years to the director's home. He said that the other laborers had pitched in to assist the trusty while they were using the home as a base for a demolition project at N.C. State under the direction of Prison maintenance supervisor A. W. Livengood. While the prisoners, divided into work crews, waited between assignments, they would sometimes help with the trusty's work. Mr. Moore also said that he planned to present to the Governor evidence that the materials used in the home project came from his son-in-law and that he had hired a carpenter to perform the construction. Mr. Helms had produced two pictures, one of which had appeared on the front page of The News on Saturday, showing a purported prisoner on the porch of Mr. Moore in the process of painting, a man who identified himself to Mr. Helms as a prisoner. He also claimed to have seen and interviewed two more prisoners in the back of the house working on the garage.

Have you never heard of the law of trespass, Mr. Helms? Or did they not teach you, in your short tenure at Wake Forest before you dropped out to be a newshound, that you cannot invade the close or curtilage to peek around into the back yard of private property or go onto the property at all for a purpose beyond the scope of implied consent, such as engaging in door-to-door solicitation? Someone should have arrested Mr. Helms then and there and perhaps done the state an immense service for the future. But he would probably have produced his glasses as proof of his ability to see through walls and around corners, in both directions at once, and claimed that he entered the property in the first instance to hand out a Willis Smith campaign flyer.

Because Korean war news would force such state and local stories off the front page of The News when the final decision would be made on the fate of Mr. Moore, we jump you ahead to July 1, when the report appeared that he had the previous day resigned his post following a hearing before the Highway Commission, insisting that he had done nothing wrong but leaving because he believed he could not serve the state any longer "with credit". The Commission unanimously accepted the resignation and took no action.

A group of ten Mecklenburg County residents, in a letter to Attorney General J. Howard McGrath, charged that the Farmers Cooperative Exchange of Raleigh had violated a quoted provision of the Federal Corrupt Practices Act by using corporate funds to support Senator Frank Graham's Senate primary campaign.

Meanwhile, in Raleigh, Willis Smith announced that he would deliver a statewide radio address the following night, while Senator Graham's headquarters said that his only major speech on tap was that of a supporting judge, to be delivered over the radio on Wednesday night.

Parenthetically, in fairness, we should note that the Jesse Helms Center website hotly disputes the attribution to Mr. Helms of the notorious "White People, Wake Up" Smith campaign flyer distributed in 1950 by the "Know the Truth Committee", or any authorship of similar verbiage emanating from Smith supporters during the campaign trying to suggest that Senator Graham was a Communist or Communist sympathizer who advocated "mingling" of the races, and further denies that Mr. Helms was ever directly, in a formal capacity, associated with the Smith campaign at all, though admittedly having been a verbal supporter over WRAL radio and joining Mr. Smith's staff after he won the election and went to Washington, staying until Senator Smith's death in mid-1953. But that latter fact immediately begs the question why, then, Mr. Helms, then 29, was ingratiated to the staff of Mr. Smith. It was certainly not his educational background, which spanned all of about two years beyond high school, or his impressive legislative knowledge or immense experience in political campaigns. So, arguably worse than the ascribed production of the racist campaign rhetoric and material, was it, more than anything else, the undeniable fact, heretofore not examined, of his ability to stir up controversy from thin air, just in the nick of time, two weeks before the Senate runoff, against Governor Scott's Administration, so as to be able to cast that dirt, Mr. Moore's alleged use of prisoners to work on his home, onto Senator Graham whom Governor Scott had appointed to the Senate in March, 1949 and was thus considered closely aligned with the Senator?

The same website dedicated to Mr. Helms also claims, among other such denials, that the infamous "hands" racial quotas campaign commercial, broadcast repeatedly across the state during the Senate campaign of 1990, was not intended to be racist, and that Mr. Helms meant no implied threat of violence to President Clinton on November 21, 1994 when he said that the President was so unpopular among military personnel that he "better have a bodyguard" if he ever came to North Carolina, a statement which Mr. Helms then attempted to characterize the following day as a "mistake", though a mistake made late on the eve of the 31st anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy, calculated therefore for news release on the anniversary.

The pilot and passenger of a light plane were both killed the previous day when the plane crashed on a hillside on a farm in Rowan County, between China Grove and Rockwell.

In Charlotte, a Washington official of the Housing and Home Finance agency suggested that Charlotte begin its proposed plan for a new auditorium on cleared slum land, similar to a plan to be carried out in Nashville, Tenn.

Bem Price, in the first of a series of twelve articles on the era of progress in the South, based on his tour of the region, writes from Atlanta of thousands of Southerners having been displaced from the land to crowd into the cities while others had gone to the West and Midwest to seek better opportunity. Blacks and whites were clashing increasingly over the South's traditional "master-servant relationship". On one extreme were the urban intellectuals demanding overnight change while on the other were those who not only wanted to maintain the status quo but wanted to return to the past.

World pressures had wrecked the cotton economy of the Deep South. Simultaneously, the region was held up abroad as an example of the hypocrisy of a nation which spoke of democracy while refusing full citizenship rights to its black population. There were great islands of poverty and ignorance throughout the region, marked by abject slums in the cities and one-room schoolhouses, grey shacks, eroded land and unkempt farms in the rural areas. At the same time, the income levels were on the rise for all Southerners, creating pressure for improvement through increased expectations.

Millions of industrial dollars had poured into the economy of the region, building new plants and employing thousands. Agricultural practices had improved with diversity of crop production.

The net result of the changes was a progressing South, but with the consequence of an increasing divide between its black and white population over the role black citizens were to play in the new South, creating divisions not only between the races but also among each race. Sociologist Dr. Preston Valien of Fisk University in Nashville said that one of the great sorrows of the region was the lack of understanding between blacks and whites, as the two racial groups had virtually no contact with one another save in the workplace, enabling no mutual understanding of home life, fears, ambitions, or hopes across the sides of the invisible divide.

In Elizabeth, N.J., safe crackers robbed a sportswear company of several hundred thousand dollars and left a note stenciled on the side saying, "Thanks a million."

On the editorial page, "The Burdensome Mantle" urges that the Marshall Plan commitment be continued in full, as to discontinue it or reduce it to an ineffective level of spending would be to undermine the effective job of rebuilding the Western European economies it had accomplished in its first two years, with two years yet to go. Both General Eisenhower, speaking at the Columbia University commencement, and the President, speaking at the University of Missouri commencement, had said as much, with the President urging continuation as necessary beyond 1952. The piece finds that to have allies in Europe who were economically insecure would be the same as having an enemy in the event of war. It was therefore to the mutual benefit of the allies and the U.S. to get the war-torn nations fully back on their feet.